


At the Edges, at the Seams

by TruckThat



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Makeouts, armadillo problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-07 23:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1918278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/TruckThat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Night Vale, like much of the American Southwest, has the regular kind of armadillos. They also have animals which are relatively like armadillos, depending on the apparent speed at which the armadillo is moving in relation to the observer as that speed approaches the speed of light. And depending on how many claws you like your armadillos to have. If Carlos were a smarter man or a worse scientist, he would probably have left those ones alone.</p>
<p>He’s not even a biologist, come on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the Edges, at the Seams

**Author's Note:**

> In light of my EXTREME post-episode 49B feelings I wrote you... this tiny fic set sometime a while after First Date. Stop looking at me like that.

Fuck, thinks Carlos, bleeding out on the gravel at the shoulder of Route 800. Fucking relativistic armadillos.

Cecil— _thank God_ it’s Cecil; brilliant, possibly-precognitive Cecil—shows up ten minutes later at a dead run, wearing full jogging gear, and skids to a horrified stop. He hiccups with what looks an awful lot like terror. Licheny grey, scrabbling-down-the-highway-embankment terror. But now he’s at Carlos’s level with his hands all over Carlos’s stupidly undefended sides, under his shirt (his favourite shirt, and it’s probably shredded) and it’s _Cecil_ , and thank God he’s here. Shockingly quickly, Cecil’s hands are red and wet with blood. That’s Carlos’s blood. Right? Carlos is glad to see him, is always glad to see him, anyway.

“Do you... jog?” Carlos asks. He even has the terry headband. It’s getting hard to regulate what is and is not the right amount of air to breathe in. Cecil is definitely hiccupping. The buzzards circling overhead are starting to make him woozy, so Carlos squeezes his eyes shut. He tries to listen, though, because Cecil is apologizing and asking and maybe yelling something from very, very far away.

It’s almost exactly like the wet dream that Carlos had two nights ago. Except that everything is much greyer and fading out.

 

He dreams this time about Cecil and the angels. And Cecil naked, with a hundred mouths like the angels’ hundred extra eyes: gaping, hungry, everywhere.

 

When Carlos greys back in, it seems likely that some sort of phase shift has taken place inside his skull. If, indeed, his brain has begun to sublimate around the edges due to armadillo-related stresses, it would easily account for the way that his head is swimming. It might also account for the way that none of what Carlos expects to wake up to see is actually present—not the many-edged eldritch terror of the fucking, _fucking_ armadillos, and not (presuming that the armadillos may also have been a dream) Carlos’s own mostly ordinary bedroom ceiling. Instead, he gets Cecil’s sublimely worried face craned inches over his own.

“Carlos!” Cecil says, “Carlos, thank goodness, I was so—” he breathes, smoothes his voice out, tries to be reproachful, “you had me _very_ concerned.” Then he clearly realizes that he is practically hunched, stork-like, directly over Carlos’s nose and directly in Carlos’s personal space.

It is obviously a difficult choice between flustered dignity and flustered abject embarrassment when Cecil stumbles backwards, because Cecil has definitely not taken Carlos to the municipally-sanctioned hospital. They’re in a bedroom. Cecil’s bedroom, Carlos realizes. It’s too full of books and clean, folded slacks and blood-red heliotrope-quartzite crystals to be anyone’s guest room.

“Ah,” Cecil rumples, when he sees Carlos looking around, “you should probably know, I’ve taken the liberty of—well. Well, we’re at my place. Not because—not for any _untoward_ reasons, of course, I mean, look at you—you look—” he stops. And swallows. And starts a new sentence. “I only thought that given the nature of your experiments and how touchy the City Council can be about the armadillos, especially these days, it might be better not to _officially_ go to the medi-centre. So,” he finishes, untriumphant. Frankly, he looks like he might be about to start hiccupping again.“Yes. Here we are.”

What on earth has Carlos even _said_ to make Cecil deflate until he seems to take up only half the space he’d occupied when he started out, no longer all flushed and swelled up with relief? But of course, he hasn’t. Said anything. Studying Cecil’s expression, which is almost as scared-white as it was at the roadside, Carlos experiences a leap of inductive reasoning. Some part of Carlos from before Night Vale thinks that this should make him want to roll his eyes. He doesn’t. He levers himself up, slowly, slooowly, and discovers that against all expectations, his viscera seem to be more or less contained once more. Cecil has not only taken him home, he’s patched him up. Not quite seamlessly, but.

(The more time Carlos spends in Night Vale, the more time he seems to spend discovering new and untoward seams that he hadn’t previously known were potential problems.)

This evasion of municipal health care is probably—judging by Cecil’s pale, uneven cast, is almost definitely— _so_ illegal. If Carlos is right it’s not really the illegality of the act that has Cecil sweating pearlescently in the overdue dusk.

“I hope—” Cecil falters, after Carlos tries for too long and still can’t quite figure out what to say, but Carlos cuts him off.

“Thanks, Cecil.”

Cecil’s blush is even brighter than his relief. Written all over Cecil’s bony face is the precise feeling of being in eighth grade and being staggeringly, awfully in love with the captain of the cheer team, whose locker is two lockers over from yours, who is absolutely, stunningly, magnificently beautiful and also in possession of breasts—and who has just acknowledged your existence, in passing, with a smile. Cecil looks _that_ flabbergasted, that luminously delighted.

Carlos doesn’t understand why. They’ve been going on dates: they’ve been _dating_. Cecil is the weirdest person, in fact, to whom Carlos has ever willingly spoken after dark. They’ve even kissed. Surely he must know that Carlos has been willingly speaking to him. So Carlos doesn’t understand _why_. But he looks at Cecil standing there with his elbows all unhinged in blissful shock and yes, Carlos definitely _understands._

Tremendously carefully, Carlos runs one finger along the neat, new scar that he has now instead of the oozing gash from where something relatively like an armadillo has tried to rework his personal geometry with its claws. It aches a little, like new things sometimes do. Whatever Cecil did about it, though, the seam doesn’t sting, and Cecil is still blinking at him in stunned glory. Like this conversation is perfect, like this conversation is exactly and completely everything he has ever wanted out of Carlos. It’s not even a two-sided conversation. It’s an inadequate thank-you. Carlos understands, because there’s something buoyant in him, too, when Cecil looks at him like that. Something that reminds Carlos perfectly and unspeakably of middle school.

The thing that makes it even more unspeakable is that, no matter what Carlos is doing, Cecil looks at him like that. Or talks about him like that. Cecil just kind of is like that, in general, in Carlos’s direction. It makes Carlos feel a little bad for almost dying, for not really knowing how to say thank you properly for something like that, for almost forgetting to say thank you when Cecil has definitely done something—probably something extraordinary and terrible—to stop Carlos from dying after all.

“What’s the recovery time on this?” Carlos asks, prodding at it. Better not to ask what, precisely, this _is_.

Cecil squints a bit. “Hmm, well, how do you feel? You lost quite a bit of blood,” he says, and there’s the tiniest shadow of his worry. The quantifiable evidence of it in Cecil’s hesitation. “I mean, really, quite a bit. But then, I did put quite a bit back _in_...”

He leans back down to look closer at the edge where there should have been a wound. Carlos does understand that look, too: the expression of someone who is doing science. Or, the expression that Cecil thinks you should wear for scientific pursuits. He is touching the edges, very delicately. The ache deepens and Carlos hopes he isn’t going to come unseamed again.

Cecil’s eyes in the low light are numinous and soft. ‘Numinous,' as an adjective, isn't something that Carlos had much use for, before Night Vale and Cecil.

(Neither is the mechanics of navigating this sort of thing with another man. Ideas that seemed other before seem much closer from here.)

Cecil’s breathing in the twilight is fast and oxygen-hungry, and Carlos wonders: is Cecil nervous about this? About any of these things? He isn’t babbling—he’d thought Cecil would be a nervous babbler, probably. He knows that Cecil is a nervous babbler. Carlos wonders if _Carlos_ is nervous; he wonders how he can be uncertain on this point, with Cecil Palmer’s fingertips brushing intimately at a very recent, very vulnerable injury. He surely should be either extremely frightened or completely reassured.

“Well,” Cecil breathes after a minute of empirical scrutiny. “Well, that certainly looks better than it did. And I,” he glances at his awful, neon-plastic digital watch, “must regretfully be on my way. I’d better get to the station. You know.”

“I do know,” Carlos has to reassure him lest Cecil stay there all night, uncomfortably close but not quite unwelcomely so. And who knows what would happen if Cecil missed a shift.

“Right,” Cecil nods. “Right, well, time and tide wait for no man, and neither does station management.”

He turns to go with the finality of someone who is about to be exactly on time for work, and then stops. “Carlos.” He turns around in the doorway. “If you can stand it, it might be better, tonight, if you... stayed. Until I came back.”

That could be either a statement of concern for Carlos’s well-being or a declaration of intent. With Cecil, it’s almost impossible to tell. Not to say that Cecil is any great enigma; at least, not in this respect. But it is possible—Carlos considers it probable—that when it comes to Cecil, concern and intent may be one and the same.

“Yeah,” Carlos says, “sure.” His voice is an embarrassing scrape, and he’s only just noticed that he is _starving_. “Um. Do you have anything to eat?”

Cecil smiles ear to ear. “Oh, good,” he says, happier than is sensible. “There’s soup on the stove. I’d hoped you’d be well enough to be hungry—please help yourself. It’s chicken noodle. Probably. Or there’s leftover pizza, if you’d prefer—or, or some cauliflower, I think, that you could cook? If you don’t want Rico’s? Or—” He contains himself, physically, curling up just a little self-deprecatingly around the edges. It makes him appear fractionally saner. Of course he dramatically saved Carlos’s life _and then made soup_ ; of _course_ he did. “Help yourself to any of it. Really. But I should go before I’m... missed.” And then Cecil does go, without shutting or locking any of his doors.

Carlos helps himself as instructed, and it is delicious and, almost definitely, chicken. He’s exhausted as well as ravenous, he discovers, drained down to nothing just by the act of walking to the kitchen. So he hauls his soup back to Cecil’s bed and eats it propped up there, with the old-fashioned alarm clock radio switched on. Tired as he is, he wants to know what Cecil has to say about the armadillos. God knows nothing Carlos could say about them would explain them. He falls asleep with the empty soup bowl on the pillow next to him and Cecil’s radio voice warm like cashmere in his ears.

 

He wakes up later, maybe not that much later or maybe a very long time afterwards, to Cecil’s soft breath of laughter quite close by. “Carlos,” Cecil murmurs, “you’ll get broth in your hair. You’ve already _got_ broth on my pillowcase.”

“Mm, sorry,” Carlos tries not to slur.

“Not at all. It’s _adorable_.” That’s the voice that Cecil uses only for kittens and Carlos’s everyday activities, normally, but now it’s pitched dark and soft to match how it’s the middle of the night. The radio is playing a staticky compilation of wind and storm noises. It’s quite soothing. Assuming it’s the same night, Carlos can’t have been asleep for more than a few hours, after all. Still, he feels much, much better.

With half a groan, he sits up and moves the soup bowl to the bedside table. “So,” he says, “thanks for the soup. And the bed—I’m sorry about the, uh. Broth.” (Thanks for the _bed_ , Carlos? _Really_?)

“Oh,” Cecil says, wryly like he noticed that too even though he doesn’t follow up on it, “no. You’re welcome. Thank you for staying.”

He doesn’t sound as giddy as Carlos had possibly, selfishly, suspected he would, though. Maybe he thinks Carlos’s side still hurts? It does, a little. “You asked me to stay.”

“Yes. But you didn’t _have_ to. There’s really no danger that you’ll tear open again now, you know.”

“I know. I feel fine.”

“You _are_ fine,” Cecil says, slowly.

“Yeah, I know, Cecil, that’s what just I said.” Cecil stares at him for long enough that Carlos has time to really start to wonder what on earth is wrong, and then crumples to brace both his arms on the edge of the bed, bent over like a marathon runner just past the finish line.

“You’re really still fine, oh my _God_ ,” Cecil says to the floor, says to no one, “I swear, I thought it was over. And then I got to the station and I started to think I’d come home and find out that it hadn’t worked after all. There was so much,” he shudders, “blood. I was thinking about goddamn _necromancy_ , Carlos. And that’s just—that’s unreliable.”

“You... didn’t have to use necromancy though, right?” Carlos doesn’t believe in necromancy because necromancy is not real, nor are other dark magics. He is reliably certain of this. He _was_ reliably certain of this, once. Someplace far from here.

“ _No_.” Cecil, hushed, night-time Cecil, sounds like he is dying a bit. Like he expects the floor to commiserate with his tremendous pain. “I didn’t use necromancy.” Like he’d spent all night at work hysterically convincing himself that he might come home to find Carlos unexpectedly dead on his kitchen floor, even after the soup. Like he hasn’t figured out or can’t quite believe that Carlos has stayed in his bed on _purpose_. Or, well, Carlos did fall asleep there. That part had been an accident, but anyway: mostly on purpose.

Definitely on purpose, so Carlos reaches out to Cecil in the comforting, grey gloom. Cecil, incandescent with worry and relief. Cecil, possibly just incandescent in general.

Cecil lets Carlos catch him by the shirtsleeve—still his work shirt, so it’s almost normal and not some kind of hairy or leathery or clashing travesty. He lets Carlos angle him in and crawls helpfully over the bed, and over Carlos. But when Carlos has him in close enough to do something really _purposeful_ , Cecil just collapses over his torso like he intends to force Carlos to wear him like a very heavy blanket. He buries his face in the side of Carlos’s neck with a groan. “Oh, Carlos, _why_ the armadillos? I told you they were outside the parameters of science. I _told_ you to let them stay that way.”

“I know. You did.” Carlos cards his fingers through Cecil’s clean, dispirited hair and wonders if he’s learned his lesson this time around.

“I don’t expect you to _learn_ , but I—” Cecil breaks off with a sigh. His fingers work their way into the dismal little holes in the ratty edges of Carlos’s old National Geographic Society t-shirt, and it’s a little worn-out, a little stained now with blood, but it’s surprisingly intact still. Carlos found it earlier, on his way to the soup, folded with loving meticulousness over the back of Cecil’s desk chair. It was nice of Cecil to save it. If it had been Carlos performing life-saving first aid, he probably would have ripped it straight off, frantic, but not Cecil. Cecil was frantic, definitely, and he still somehow saved Carlos’s favourite shirt—not with necromancy, or at least Carlos can hope Cecil’s telling the truth about that. He’s drifting. Cecil is warm, welcome weight, and Cecil is not particularly nice, on the whole, but he’s _nice_ here like this.

Cecil’s fingers reverse field, slowly, and Carlos comes back from wherever he was drifting off to with a sudden surge of heat, because Cecil is not clinging into his shirt anymore. Cecil is lacing himself _under_ Carlos’s shirt instead, with deliberate, arachnid slowness like he thinks Carlos might not notice, _instantly_ , that Cecil is going in for third base.

It’s not like Cecil (it is _really_ not like Cecil) to be handsy. Three dates in Carlos had been hoping— Well, no, three dates in Carlos had been religiously cleaning his room before every date, _just in case,_ the way that some people religiously-just-in-case chant to their bloodstone circles. He can’t help it. It’s Cecil. Cecil is... Three days before Carlos even really asked him out, which not coincidentally was three days in which Carlos knew that definitely, yes, he was going to phone Cecil and he was going to _ask him out_ and Cecil was going to say yes and they were going to _date_ (only he hadn’t quite done it yet because he was waiting until conditions were optimal) Carlos was using most of his spare time for research. The Wikipedia and porn kind of research. Not the research kind.

They’re at least six dates in by now. Seven, if you count home medical treatments. And Cecil is insane. Cecil is insane, and he likes Carlos _too much_ , and God only knows what passes for normal mating rituals in Night Vale—it could be anything, especially if you count home medical treatments—and God help him, Carlos likes him back anyway. These things don’t seem complicated, but it is Carlos’s motto that a scientist can never know for sure until he really knows for sure.

So basically, Carlos has spent a reasonably high percentage of his time since he came to this town wishing that it was more like Cecil to be handsy. But Cecil was so—Cecil, and it was so entirely possible (Carlos had, terrifiedly, thought) that Cecil was waiting for something, something complicated maybe: for marriage, or a divine proclamation, or the correct alignment of the stars.

But Cecil is all hands now, with his thumb running carefully around Carlos’s ribs and avoiding that fresh scar, and without even looking up to check if Carlos wants to wait for some better day when he’s not groggy as hell and hasn’t just finished bleeding out on the gravel. That’s just as well: Carlos does not want to wait for either of those things. Carlos does not want to wait for anything except for Cecil to touch him more, better. He’s pretty sure Cecil has his eyes closed anyway, the better to slowly breathe Carlos in, the better to feel with his own hands that Carlos is breathing too. He's been waiting for this for days and weeks, and now that he almost has it he discovers that he is frozen, that he cannot do a single thing about it _except_ keep breathing. He discovers that he is almost afraid to move.

He wonders if Cecil came looking for him. If Cecil has been not just watching him but watching out for him ever since the thing with the tiny city, or maybe since the very first day.

He could ask, but Cecil would never tell him. To admit to that is to admit to a kind of wholehearted hoping that would make even Cecil wretchedly embarrassed. “It’s my responsibility to the show,” Cecil would say, “and to Night Vale. That’s just journalism, Carlos. People want to _know_.” You don’t hope in Night Vale, not for normal things. Not for things like a moment in the warm dark in Cecil’s bed, where Cecil slides up to meet you when you cannot move to meet him, and your faces are inches apart and you both suddenly, hopingly, breathe in at the exact same sharp moment.

“Carlos,” Cecil says, like it’s a desperate secret and not a known fact for everyone who has ever happened to turn on their radio.

“Cecil,” Carlos says, and Cecil kisses him. Cecil has kissed him before, more than once. This time, Cecil’s long fingers are slotted around Carlos like he wants to be _inside_ his ribcage, like he’d breathe _for_ Carlos if it would keep them both breathing in sync.

This time is better.


End file.
